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MADRID - The war in Iran has once again served as a stark reminder that what happens in East Asia, South Asia, or Russia affects Europe and the United States far more profoundly than Western powers would care to admit, particularly now that they are beginning to perceive that, in several important respects, these influences lie beyond their control.
This reality lays bare a fundamental truth: this will not be the West's century, as the previous three or four hundred years were. As political scientist Charles Kupchan observes: "The next world will hardly be the first in which great powers operate according to different conceptions of order. But, owing to the emergence of global interdependence, it will be the first time that such a diverse set of orders interacts with one another so intensely and continuously."
It is within this interdependence that the centrality of Eurasia emerges. As Bruno Maçães explains in The Dawn of Eurasia: "Eurasia turns out to be the largest landmass on Earth, the place where most of humanity's great civilizations developed, where they had both the space needed to forge autonomous forms of existence and the geographic continuity that compelled them to come into contact and compete for power."
Of course, this political space, stretching from the Baltic and Black Seas to the South China Sea and the western Pacific, and from the Arctic to the Indian Ocean, remains unorganized. Various projects and competing visions coexist, and actors are already actively engaged in the task of imposing order, yet no single political framework encompasses both Europe and Asia. In fact, it was the collapse of European hegemony that gave rise to the present disorder, even as it opened the path toward a more unified prospect: that of a new supercontinent.
But this supercontinent is no passive geographic mass, no static container, no flat surface upon which events merely unfold. It is a continuous, performative, and relational product of ongoing social interactions and material practices. This point is essential to understanding that, within this unorganized space, numerous infrastructure projects are competing with one another. These are not a neutral backdrop; they are a fundamental force that produces territory.
The corridors crisscrossing Eurasia- that vast network of railways, ports, logistics hubs, fiber-optic cables, oil and gas pipelines, and energy systems- are "spatial projects" that embody specific political, economic, and ideological logics.
Infrastructure policy is, in reality, a capacity to shape mobility: to determine who and what can move, and under what conditions. Control over infrastructure implies control over circulation, which in turn establishes global hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion. Applied to Eurasia, the construction of transcontinental railways and digital networks reflects the material politics of spatial control. These projects enable development, but at the same time generate relations of dependence, which scholars call "infrastructural entanglements." They connect economies and societies, yet they also entrench hierarchies. By examining state behavior through the lens of corridor geopolitics, one can trace how connectivity shapes global governance and defines the logic of space in the twenty-first century.
Today, Eurasia's infrastructural landscape is defined by overlapping corridors, each under the influence of a great power and each embedding a particular vision of connectivity. China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the EU's Global Gateway, the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), and the International North–South Transport Corridor (INSTC), launched in 2000 by Russia, India, and Iran, collectively configure this new logic. All these projects reflect different value systems and motivations; none is neutral. Each responds to strategic calculations that shape power dynamics, security, and access.
What, then, is Iran's role in this space? This is a fundamental question for the Islamic Republic's medium- and long-term future, because mere geographic centrality, undeniable in Iran's case, is not enough to guarantee integration into these projects. The map matters, but it alone cannot ensure that Iran retains its strategic relevance.
Iran faces the following challenge: the strategic dynamics of the past decade have been marked by the construction of at least six corridors designed to bypass its territory. Yet this analysis, while accurate, must be considered in light of the current post-war context.
Most of those alternative routes, conceived to circumvent Iran, were designed with a weakened Iran in mind, something that has not come to pass. Iran emerged from the conflict as one of the central nodes of the region, and everything suggests that global logistics networks will ultimately adapt to its renewed centrality.
It is worth remembering that corridors and connectivity across Eurasia more broadly require an environment of stability to function. And Iran has made it abundantly clear: if its security is threatened, the security of the entire region will be threatened with it.
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